Free Energy, Free Everything

For thousands of years, humans have argued about the best way to organize society: capitalism, socialism, mixed systems, anarchism, whatever. Beneath the slogans, however, every debate is really about one thing. How do we allocate scarce human energy?

Every useful thing humans do (growing food, building houses, writing code, teaching kids, driving trucks) costs calories, attention, time, and willpower. These are not infinite. Because we have free will and self-interest, each person naturally tries to

• Get the maximum reward for the minimum personal effort,
• Hide how little effort they actually put in,
• Exaggerate how much they contributed,
• Take benefits without paying the full cost (free-ride),
• Defect entirely when they think they can get away with it.

This is not evil. It is biology plus optimal game theory. It is true in small tribes and true in nations of hundreds of millions.

No society has ever perfectly solved this measurement-and-incentive problem at large scale.

• Pure market systems reward winners extravagantly and leave others desperate, because markets are excellent at measuring prices but terrible at measuring “deservingness” or hidden effort.
• Socialist or planned systems try to enforce contribution through rules and oversight, but they inevitably create bureaucracies, black markets, and corruption as people game the new rules instead of the old ones.
• Even small intentional communities usually collapse or turn authoritarian once they grow beyond a few dozen people who all know and trust one another.

In every case, “fairness” remains an aspiration, never a reality. Someone always contributes less than they take. Someone else always gets exploited. The system either bleeds out from free-riding or hardens into hierarchy, surveillance, and coercion to keep the free-riders in check.

This is the eternal trap of scarcity when production still depends on scarce, free-willed human energy.

The Only Known Exit: Remove Human Energy from the Equation

There is, however, one robust way out, and only one, that does not require turning humans into angels or subjecting them to total control.

Build machines (AI + robotics) that can do almost all economically necessary work, powered by energy sources (solar, fusion, geothermal, etc.) that are functionally inexhaustible and extremely cheap.

When that happens:

• The marginal cost of goods and services collapses toward the cost of sunlight or fusion fuel, essentially zero.
• Machines have no desires, no free will, no temptation to shirk, steal, or revolt.
• They do not need wages, status, or reciprocity. You give them electricity; they give you everything else.

At that point, feeding, housing, clothing, educating, healing, and transporting every human being on Earth costs a vanishingly small fraction of total energy output. Material scarcity effectively ends, not because we redistributed anything, but because the pie itself became so large that fighting over slices feels absurd.

The ancient coordination problem (“who has to expend their finite life energy, and who gets what in return?”) simply dissolves. Not because human nature changed, but because the game board was removed.

Post-Scarcity Is Not Utopia, But It Obsoletes the Old Wars

This is not a promise of perfect harmony. People will still compete for status, love, fame, beautiful views, or the best virtual-reality simulations. But the brutal zero-sum fight over the necessities of life, the fight that has justified every economic ideology, every revolution, every tax code and bread riot in history, finally loses its material basis.

Abundance produced by non-sentient systems that require no reward is the only known escape hatch from the energy-allocation dilemma created by free-willed agents living under scarcity.

Once the machines can do the work of a billion human lifetimes per year without complaining, the debate between capitalism and socialism stops being existential. It becomes a quaint historical argument, like debating the best way to organize a hunting party after the invention of the grocery store.

Jesus Christ, I'm so excited for this future.